His mother had not seen it!  She was looking intently at her clock, which stood on the mantelpiece, and the embarrassment increased in midst of a glacial silence.  Turning her face towards her daughter, the old woman, from whose eyes flashed fierce malice, said:  “On Monday, you must take me away from here, so that I can see your little girl.  I want so much to see her.”  Madame Braux, her features illuminated, exclaimed:  “Yes, mother, that I will,” while Mdme. Caravan, the younger, became pale, and seemed to be enduring the most excruciating agony.  The two men, however, gradually drifted into conversation, and soon became embroiled in a political discussion.  Braux maintained the most revolutionary and communistic doctrines, gesticulating and throwing about his arms, his eyes darting like a blood-hound’s.  “Property, sir,” he said, “is robbery perpetrated on the working classes; the land is the common property of every man; hereditary rights are an infamy and a disgrace.”  But, hereupon, he suddenly stopped, having all the appearance of a man who has just said something foolish; then, resuming, after a pause, he said, in softer tones:  “But I can see quite well that this is not the proper moment to discuss such things.”

The door was opened, and Doctor Chenet appeared.  For a moment he seemed bewildered, but regaining his usual smirking expression of countenance, he jauntily approached the old woman, and said:  “Ah, hah! mamma, you are better to-day.  Oh!  I never had any doubt but you would come round again; in fact, I said to myself as I was mounting the staircase, ’I have an idea that I shall find the old one on her feet once more;’” and he tapped her gently on the back:  “Ah! she is as solid as the Pont-Neuf, she will see us all out; you shall see if she does not.”

He sat down, accepted the coffee that was offered him, and soon began to join in the conversation of the two men, backing up Braux, for he himself had been mixed up in the Commune.

Now, the old woman, feeling herself fatigued, wished to leave the room, at which Caravan rushed forward.  She thereupon fixed him in the eyes and said to him:  “You, you, must carry my clock and chest of drawers up stairs again without a moment’s delay.”  “Yes, mamma,” he replied, yawning; “yes, I will do so.”  The old woman then took the arm of her daughter and withdrew from the room.  The two Caravans remained rooted to the floor, silent, plunged in the deepest despair, while Braux rubbed his hands and sipped his coffee, gleefully.

Suddenly Mdme. Caravan, consumed with rage, rushed at him, exclaiming:  “You are a thief, a footpad, a cur.  I would spit in your face, if ...  I would ...  I ... would....”  She could find nothing further to say, suffocating as she was, with rage, while he still sipped his coffee, with a smile.

His wife returning just then, looked menacingly at her sister-in-law, and both—­the one with her enormous fat stomach, the other, epileptic and spare, voice changed, hands trembling—­flew at one another and seized each other by the throat.